Until now Apple's Live Photos were largely confined to your iPhone 6S, 6S Plus or SE so you were limited in how you could share them. Thanks to a new SDK you can now add LivePhotos to a website.

Introduced by Apple at last year's WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) Live Photos are the combination of a still image and a short video in a single file format and let the user snap photos that animate like GIFs for playback.

In this video Tom Honeyands of Trusted Reviews shows off the feature from the point of view of the user where he explains how a few second's of video is shot around the moment when you take the photo:

Playback on the iPhone 6S, 6S Plus or SE takes advantage of their support for Force Touch. Initially, the images appear still, but when you press down on them, the extra material, before and after the photo instant is played together with sound from the video.

The newly released LivePhotoKit JS library now enables devs to play Live Photos in web pages:

The JavaScript API presents the player in the form of a DOM element, much like an image or videotag, which can be configured with photo and video resources and other options, and have its playback controlled either programmatically by the consuming developer, or via pre-provided controls by the browsing end-user.

To use it you first embed LivePhotosKit JS, which is also available via NPM, in your webpage and enable JavaScript strict mode.

After this you can create players by simply adding declarative markup to your HTML. As the page loads, LivePhotosKit JS will determine what player instances are on the page and initialize them. You can use any HTML tag that supports child nodes. Then you can specify the locations of the photo and video components by setting the data-photo-src and data-video-src attributes, respectively.